Allison Silverman

She makes the fake Bill O'Reilly funnier than the real one

Mar 20, 2009

Silverman: Jeffrey Neira; Colbert: Joel Jefferies

I am lucky to have Allison Silverman at my back. For one thing, she's 5'11''—if she were at my front, no one would see me. But more importantly because she is an amazingly gifted comedy writer and producer. The thoughts that come out of her head are, if possible, even more impressive than those biblical curls on top of it. When I found out ELLE was presenting a series of interviews with smart women, I immediately called in all my markers and pulled every string to get a sit-down with my brilliantly funny dear friend.—Stephen Colbert

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Stephen Colbert: Was there a point where you said, "I'm going to do comedy," or was it an accident?

Allison Silverman: I looked back at some high school journals and discovered that I definitely wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily comedy. And some stuff about a boy named Mike Sawicki.

SC: In this journal, was he pleasing you or upsetting you?

AS: I thought he was a dork because boys went to his house and played video games and baked cakes.

SC: Easy-Bake Oven cakes or "Let's get high and watch Doom and bake a seven-layer cake"?

AS: I think it was more homespun. In retrospect, it sounds pretty great.

SC: Was being funny valuable to you?

AS: In high school, I was performing "forensics." You take a section of a play and portray all the characters. I even went to camp for forensics.

AS: There was a woman there, a teacher at Stuyvesant [High School], who believed in me.

SC: What did she say?

AS: I think she said, "I believe in you."

SC: Then off to Yale to major in molecular biology.

AS: I've seen that on the Web, but that wasn't my major. I do love science. My father is a scientist.

SC: My dad was too.

Silverman: Jeffrey Neira; Colbert: Joel Jefferies

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AS: I've met a surprising number of comedy writers whose parents are scientists. Both have an antiauthoritarian slant—they're both skeptics.

SC: So what did you major in if the molecular biology thing is a lie that you promulgated to make yourself seem smart?

AS: Astrophysics. No, humanities. And I did improv at Yale, with the Exit Players. It was great, but they played a little rough.

SC: In the improv community, if you slip up an inch they ride you like a cowboy on a bronco to the gales of riotous laughter of everyone watching you die. But you didn't die. Did it toughen you up?

AS: Yes. But I remember one guy saying, "You're the only human out of all of them," and feeling a little concerned that somehow that meant I wasn't as funny.

SC: I think one unusual thing about you is that you've maintained your humanity, which I maintain is your clubfoot. In Native American society—and please don't write me, Native Americans, if I'm getting this wrong—a shaman has something wrong with him. He's maimed. In this world, strangely enough, your deformity is that you still have emotions. As my executive producer, you provide a level of humanity and decency in the writing, which I think is easy to toss out in comedy because we try to top each other in terms of how outrageous we can be.

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AS: I hope so. But when I was at [Late Night With Conan O'Brien], I wrote a piece called "Conan Hates My Homeland," which was blunt insults to country upon country, alphabetically. I actually write some pretty tough jokes. I don't want to push this "soft" angle too much. Women are often pushed into the idea that they write softer, more character-driven jokes.

SC: Okay, back to your biography. What happened after college?

AS: I went straight to Chicago. So I guess I did want to do comedy, because a big reason to go to Chicago is to do comedy. Then I got a job writing for The Daily Show.

SC: At The Daily Show, did you have that moment when you thought, I can play, I've got it?

AS: I remember some jokes I liked, mainly because they were so simple. One was about the Muppets being sold to a German company. The joke was, "Jim Henson created the Muppets in 1961 with a single mission: to keep them out of the hands of the Germans." I like that joke a lot.

SC: Then you went to Conan. What was that like?

Silverman: Jeffrey Neira; Colbert: Joel Jefferies

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AS: Very different. At The Daily Show, I really loved crafting the writing. Late Night was about forming an idea and then producing it.

SC: If you had to choose between writing and producing, which would it be?

AS: Writing. It's just my first love. And I still have some issues with telling people what to do.

SC: You have an incredibly fast-paced job now. What's the hardest part of your day?

AS: The morning, when I need to have opinions and answers across the board very quickly. It's a constant fight between ease and inspiration, what will make our lives easier versus what will make us excited because we were ambitious.

SC: You may throw three hours at an idea and then realize the other one was better. At a daily show you don't necessarily have the luxury of being wrong. If you are, the last three hours of your day will feel like the last hours you'll ever do the job. But, if you're right, you'll feel like you could do it for 10 years. What would you miss the most if you didn't do this anymore?

AS: The surprises that come with comedy. You hear something you never heard or see something that doesn't seem to make sense but somehow does.

SC: So what did writing for this character [Stephen Colbert] turn out to be?

AS: A long role-playing game. It's like improv.

SC: Sometimes I'll see you having an ongoing argument with your computer screen, and I'll realize you're trying to figure out the argument of the Stephen Colbert character.

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